New sheriffs in town – but will the face of law and order change?

Wiith the election of police and crime commissioners, political parties are
missing a major chance to improve justice in towns and cities

Labour’s equivocation on crime commissioners is a symptom of its deepening fault line on criminal justice. 'Ed’s not strong enough to come down for what he really believes in,' says one senior sourcePhoto: Rex Features

No prizes for naming the ballot of the week. Citizens, Tory MPs included, have shown more enthusiasm in voting for Nadine Dorries to be buried in a bug-filled pit than they are likely to demonstrate tomorrow in the elections for the first, and maybe the last, police and crime commissioners (PCCs). Such is the state of our democracy.

This low point should be a particular embarrassment for the beleaguered Home Secretary. Theresa May would no doubt rather face trial by cockroach, like Mrs Dorries, than watch the newly freed Abu Qatada score a victory in his personalised reality show, I’m A Celebrity, Don’t Throw Me Out Of Here. To compound her woes, the turnout for the PCC elections, a flagship Government policy, could be less than 20 per cent.

That poll, along with three by-elections and the Bristol mayoral contest, will be a significant mid-term test of the state of the parties. Even if Super Thursday becomes supine Thursday, a convincing win in Corby, the bellwether seat vacated by the Tory Louise Mensch, might suggest that Ed Miliband’s One Nation Labour is on course for Downing Street.

But while, on Labour’s day of truth, a good win in Corby would affirm its strength, the PCC elections have already exposed a central weakness. There is a good case to be made for rendering the police more democratically accountable, after disasters ranging from Hillsborough to child sex abuse investigations – but Mr Miliband has not made it.

Instead, Labour has adopted the almost criminally ambivalent line that, while it opposes the elections, it will try to win as many of the 41 vacancies as possible. A major constitutional change could, as the Oxford criminologist, Ian Loader, has pointed out, lead to a more democratic police service. Instead the elections will, in the Tories’ case, be all about choosing glorified crime-fighters to catch and punish more criminals, and in Labour’s, be little more than a referendum on the Government’s police cuts. While, in fairness, Mr Miliband has also argued for strengthening the ties between people and constabulary, he has failed properly to address what the police are for. As Prof Loader has suggested, they are not merely a crime-fighting machine but the indicator of how adequately any society attends to the security and well-being of all its members.

Labour’s equivocation on crime commissioners is a symptom of its deepening fault line on criminal justice. “Ed’s not strong enough to come down for what he really believes in,” says one senior source. Mr Miliband’s early wish to distance himself from steel-toecapped Blairite rhetoric, backed in some impressive speeches by the shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, quickly mutated into a mishmash of ideas whose most coherent line is to bash the Government on police cuts.

A hug-a-copper strategy not only looks suspect at a time when policing has fallen into such disrepute. In addition, if a reduction in police numbers is the catastrophe Labour claims, it is hard to see why crime, which has traditionally risen in recessions, fell by a further 6 per cent over the past year. With the murder rate alone down by 14 per cent, the chances of becoming a victim of crime are at their lowest since the Nineties.

Yet Labour knows that crime and immigration – of which the latter is a big doorstep topic in Corby and some PCC constituencies – are the issues that have eroded its grassroots vote, as well as alarming the floating voters it hopes to win back. Hence Mr Miliband’s reluctance to point out the time bomb under Tory criminal justice policy.

David Cameron’s promise to get tougher while rehabilitating more ex-prisoners is fatally flawed. Mr Cameron has bet the house on payment by results, under which private providers and charities get rewarded only for success. As Andrew Neilson, of the Howard League, has pointed out, chaotic people who slip in and out of trouble with the law are not amenable to the tick-box tests on which payment will depend. Nor has the system that Government has made central to its rehabilitation policy been properly tested anywhere in the world. According to one source, Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, has been heard to remark: “You don’t pilot a revolution.”

Thursday’s PCC elections are the stunted offspring of a gung-ho Government and an Opposition that has not dared to say that tough talk and craven solutions (of which Labour governments have been equally guilty) have led to chaos. With the jail population now a record 85,000, we have a criminal justice system that, as the Prison Reform Trust argues, “costs the taxpayer billions and does little or nothing to reduce reoffending”.

Far from Westminster, ordinary voters get that message. Take Margaret Foxley, the victim of a devastating crime. Mrs Foxley, a head of department at a Lancashire secondary school, surprised a burglar who fled her home with a laptop containing all her family photos. The images, which were not backed up, included the pictures of her daughter Jessica’s recent 21st birthday party.

Some weeks later, Jessica was killed in a car crash on the way home from a family wedding. “It was then that I realised the depth of my loss,” Mrs Foxley told me. Three days after her daughter’s funeral, the police rang to say that the burglar had been sent to jail and asked whether she would meet him, as part of his victim awareness course.

Devastated as she was, Mrs Foxley went because she felt her daughter would have wished her to. Initially sceptical, she gradually built up a dialogue with the burglar who sold her treasured laptop for £35. Many months on, she has watched him get off drugs, leave prison and go straight. Mrs Foxley, no soft-touch liberal, is a Conservative councillor who will sit on one of the PCC panels holding the new commissioners to account. She will remain an evangelist for restorative justice, which brings victims and perpetrators face to face.

Mr Miliband is also a fervent supporter of this proven method of helping victims recover and reducing reoffending, but voters could be forgiven for being unaware of his enthusiasm. Nor has Labour been shouting from the rooftops that police commissioners, who will set policing plans and budgets, could play a vital role in recalibrating law and order. None the less, the PCC elections could herald a focus on community justice which would make citizens safer, reform criminals and steer potential offenders away from trouble.

If, instead, tomorrow’s ballots lead only to a new constitutional tier in which deadbeats and political hacks end up with fat salaries and no broad mandate, democracy will be the poorer. It may, however, be possible, even from this imperfect beginning, to forge the foundations of a fairer system.

That will depend, in turn, on whether Mr Miliband follows his better instincts. If Labour has a good day in Corby, where the Tory peer and political analyst Lord Ashcroft is predicting a massive (and very possibly inflated) 22 per cent lead, that will be the first sign that a message of social hope and economic competence can neutralise fears on immigration and on crime. If Ed Miliband is serious about forging one nation, he must first take on the spectres Labour has not dared to vanquish.